Professional Amabie illustration with pink-red hair, diamond-patterned eyes, colorful scales, and luminous aura.

Amabie

2020Participatory illustration challenge / folk art memeclassic

Published March 24, 2026

Also known as: アマビエ · Amabie Challenge · #AMABIEchallenge

Amabie is a Japanese yōkai from 1846 folklore that exploded into a global participatory art movement during the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. The three-legged, beak-faced sea creature, said to ward off disease when its image is shared, inspired tens of thousands of original illustrations posted under hashtags like #AMABIEchallenge. What started as a niche bit of Edo-period folklore turned into one of 2020's most distinctive internet memes, crossing from Japanese Twitter to international art communities and government public health campaigns.

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Overview

Amabie, a mermaid-like spirit from Japanese folklore depicted with long hair, a bird's beak, fish scales, and three fin-like legs. According to legend, the creature appeared to a government official in Higo Province (modern-day Kumamoto Prefecture) in 1846, predicted six years of good harvests followed by disease, and instructed the official to draw its image and share it with the sick1. This encounter was documented in a single woodblock-printed bulletin called a kawaraban, now housed at the Kyoto University Library4.

For over 170 years, Amabie stayed almost entirely forgotten. Then in early 2020, as COVID-19 spread across Japan and the world, Japanese social media users rediscovered the creature's legend and began drawing and sharing their own versions. The meme's core mechanic was baked into the original folklore: draw Amabie, share the image, ward off plague. It was, as Stanford graduate student Victoria Rahbar put it, "an Edo Period meme"1.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (Japan)
Key People
@shigeokahide, Mizuki Production
Date
2020 (meme revival; folklore origin 1846)

The legend dates to mid-May 1846, when a glowing object appeared nightly in the sea off Higo Province4. A town official went to investigate and encountered a bizarre creature that identified itself as Amabie. It predicted good harvests for six years but warned of coming disease, instructing the official: "Draw a picture of me and show the picture of me to those who fall ill"2. The official sketched the creature and the story was published via kawaraban, the woodblock-printed news sheets of the Edo period.

Amabie's record exists only in that single broadsheet preserved by Kyoto University Library4. Scholars believe the name may be a copyist's error for "amabiko," a similar prophetic yōkai with far more extensive historical documentation dating back to the 1840s6. Unlike the mermaid-like Amabie, amabiko was depicted in various forms, from ape-like figures to daruma doll shapes.

Amabie stayed obscure for generations. A small number of anime fans knew the creature from its appearance in the 2007 anime adaptation of GeGeGe no Kitarō, Shigeru Mizuki's famous yōkai manga franchise, where it appeared as a cute, pastel-scaled mermaid friend of the title character10. But for most people, Amabie was a deep-cut footnote in yōkai studies until COVID-19 changed everything.

How It Spread

On February 28, 2020, Twitter user @shigeokahide posted a drawing of Amabie captioned "Coronavirus measures," picking up over 100 retweets and 240 likes5. In the following days, yōkai fans and artists like @orochidou and @KitanoYoukaiten shared their own illustrations. A tweet by @youmisedori earned 29,900 retweets and 35,000 likes within five days5.

On March 6, Kyoto University Library posted the original 1846 woodblock print on its Twitter account, drawing attention to the primary source document and giving the movement an air of scholarly legitimacy7. Japanese users began uploading Amabie art under hashtags including #アマビエ, #アマビエチャレンジ (Amabie Challenge), and #アマビエ祭り (Amabie Fes), with the trend spreading to Pixiv, Nico Nico Seiga, and Instagram5. J-CAST and the Jiji Press wire service both covered the growing movement3.

The biggest single boost came on March 17, when Mizuki Production, the estate of legendary yōkai manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, tweeted an illustration of Amabie with the caption "May the modern-day plague go away"1. That tweet earned over 95,400 retweets and 196,000 likes in three weeks. Other manga artists followed, including Mari Okazaki, who told BBC: "I think people who see all of that [dark news] want to enjoy themselves"1.

By late March, the #AMABIEchallenge hashtag had appeared in English, and according to Google Trends the search term had spread to five continents1.

Frequently Asked Questions